“Perfect teeth, great smell, a class act all the way.” --Homer Simpson
Gaudere
So long as you judge morality by your interpretation of what happens in the wave field, moral judgement will always be problematic. If you insist on judging morality, then judge it rightly as God does. Be the person whose morality you’re attempting to assess.
The point of your being here is not to assess the morality of others. That is quite impossible for you, given the closed set of your consciousness.
What you see from your reference frame is not what anyone else sees from his own. The Hitlers and the guys next door have their own play. What you must do, as a free moral agent, is express your own morality in whatever context you find yourself.
You cannot know whether Hitler is good or bad. You can know only whether Gaudere is. If you believe you are not good, then ask Him to renew your Spirit, and He will.
Ura-Maru
Take one more tiny step. It is not possible for you to comprehend someone else’s morality unless you yourself are perfect, which would place your viewpoint in the Absolute Reference Frame along with His. That is, you would “see” things exactly the same way He does.
Define Himself? No, He already is defined as Good, having made the choice to be Good, and that choice being eternal.
He created these other reference frames so that His love (that of a Free Moral Agent) might be multiplied.
But I don’t think I’m perfectly good either. If I were, I would always do the right thing, and I don’t. However, I don’t think I can be perfectly evil, either, since I do love, and I think I love sincerely. I don’t think that having people in perfectly good and perfectly evil categories is accurate or useful. If I thought I was perfectly good already, why should I try to be a better person? But how can I be perfectly evil if I do some good things? And, no offense intended, but I would no more ask God to renew my Spirit than I would ask Santa for a pony. 
How could God renew my Spirit, anyhow? Can he make an evil Spirit good if asked? Yet if the evil Spirit wants to be good, isn’t it no longer wholly evil?
I think I have a sticking point in your philosophy here. It simply does not agree with my personal experience with myself and with other people to think that people are only either perfectly good or perfectly bad. Maybe if I try really, really hard I can find a justification as to why it is perfectly moral for someone to deliberately hurt me for their own personal gain, but one simply doesn’t seem to agree with the facts on hand. And yet, I cannot say that a person who hurts another is necessarily wholly evil, either, since their love for certain people seems quite as real as my love for another, or other people’s love for me. To say that people can only be either perfectly good or perfectly evil denies everything I know of my own heart and what I have learned of another’s–tempting though it is to simply assume that I’m perfectly good, and give up all these worrisome efforts to become a better person than I currently am. I know I cannot say for certain the contents of anyone else’s heart, but though I have met some pretty nasty people, I would never call them wholly evil; they may be cruel, malicious and selfish, but they are not without redeeming qualities. And even the finest people I have met have their weaker moments. If I were to think that a person could be wholly evil, why would I try to understand those who I think are likely evil? If I was perfectly good, and they were perfectly evil, we would not have enough in common to understand each other. I can understand them now since anger, hate and selfishness are not foreign to me, although they’re hopefully not as present in me in very large amounts. And I can understand them because they do seem to love just as I do, even if they don’t love everyone. Also, If I were to think people were wholly good, how shattered and surprised would I be when they disappointed me?
Gauder
Well, the brain is a funny thing. (Recall that it is the brain, not the Spirit, that “does” things in the wave field.) There hasn’t been a perfect one yet. Even Jesus was tempted to do evil and found Himself mired in moments of weak faith.
Sometimes, I forget that we’re debating here. There are times when I think you’re trying to understand what I’m saying, and other times when I think you are trying to counter what I’m saying. Toward the former, I would say, “Stop thinking and start loving.” Toward the latter, “If you love, you are not evil.”
What is useful depends entirely on your frame of reference. Again, if you are to come to understand the nature of good and evil, then you must look through the eyes of God.
Is a category of “perfectly good” not useful to the Divine Goodness? For the sake of argument, would you worship a god who allowed himself a little bit of evil in his nature? I know I wouldn’t.
Well, if you’re perfectly good, then you can’t be any better. By definition.
What “things”? Things are neither good nor evil. They are amoral contexts for the expression of good of evil from your heart.
No offense taken. Your decisions are your own.
Um, well, He’s God. Renewing Spirit is His specialty. He has an infinite supply of Goodness, and He gives it out in generous measure.
He does it every day.
It never was.
Look, I know this must seem exasperating, but until you get this point, you will never understand me. (Not that you ought to try anyway…) But “will be”, “was”, “no longer” — those things mean nothing in an Eternal Metaphysic.
Again, your consciousness is a closed set. Any attempts by you to figure out other people obfuscates your own moral journey. You aren’t here to figure them out. They are amoral participants in your closed reference, just as you are in theirs.
Why would you even look for such a “justification”? As I’ve told the Bible Thumpers, if God will turn to you for your advice when He makes His judgements, then by all means, hone your skills. Otherwise, tend to your own affairs, not the least of which is your own accountability to what I call God, and what you call your conscience.
Of course you can’t. Your Godness is within your own closed reference frame.
Well, you will not be good despite whatever efforts. Being good is a decision. If you need help with that decision, then it makes perfect sense to seek it from the very Source of Goodness Himself.
Gaudere, your journey isn’t about me, or Hitler, or any of those other people. It is about you.
Thus, the atoms.
Look inside, Gaudere. That is where heaven and hell are. There is nothing out here but wave peaks that manifest as synaptic discharges in a compaction of wave peaks called your brain. This out here is just one gigantic tautology.
Hmmm… You think you would be shattered, what if they were your children?
I can’t disprove that I might be perfectly good and yet sometimes do bad things because of a malfunctioning brain. Nor can I disprove that I might be perfectly evil, and only appear good to other people because of a malfunctioning brain. However, it feels like an abdication of my moral responsibility. “Oh, that’s just my brain that stole the money–I love my mother, so I’m actually perfectly good.”
Well, it may be useful to God, but when trying to understand people, it doesn’t seem so great.
I don’t agree. People are not amoral participants in my world, they are people, as valuable and as real as I myself. I don’t agree that trying to figure out other people is detrimental. What do you think we do on these boards all the time? It’s not just figuring out how other people’s brain’s work, it’s about figuring out how their hearts work, too. Not perfectly, but you can’t do that without actually being that person (and even they may not fully understand themselves), but I consider it very useful to understand why people are angry or happy or grieved–not an emotionless intellectual understanding, but to actually understand in your heart “if I was this person, yes, I would feel what he feels, because of X, Y and Z”–even if X, Y and Z are personally unimportant to you, and have no rational reason to be important to that person. I mean, any understanding I have of you is not an intellectual extrapolation based on the axioms you have revealed; things either “feel” like Libertarian or they don’t. Intellectually, our respective philosophies are pretty far apart, but you don’t seem incomprehensible to me. I may have trouble comprehending your logical theories, but not your basic humanity.
Well, I must not be, then, since I think I can be better. Crap, now I’m perfectly evil.
Well, you know, if I don’t believe God exists, it doesn’t much matter to me if I think He will ask my advice or not. I want to understand other people. I will never do so perfectly. However, if I can understand why someone would hurt me, it makes it easy to forgive and love that person. It also helps me to understand when that person might hurt me again, and persuade them not to do it or take steps to avoid or ameliorate it.
I, personally, would be not be horribly shocked if my children were less than perfectly good. As far as I can tell, no one is perfect, and I do not require perfection to love someone. Good thing, too, otherwise I couldn’t even love myself. 
You don’t need to understand other people; you just need to love them — even if you think they’re horrible; even if you think they’re perfectly evil; even if you don’t understand them at all.
Your moral journey is about understanding yourself, the essence of which is God.
Love without even an attempt at understanding seems hollow to me. It seems to mean that you could love a tree just the same as you love a human; if both are equally incomprehensible, what’s the difference? I love people because they are at heart similar to me; they fear, hurt, love, hate just as I do–to different degrees, and for different reasons, but we’re much the same. If I love and value myself, I must love and value them, then, too. And I want people to try to understand me, too, and see how I am like them and how I am unlike them. Why even post on this message board and discuss other people’s beliefs and feelings, if it is detrimental to your spiritual well-being to try to understand others?
Gaudere, sometimes I am asked what is the libertarian position on animal rights. Well, see, libertarianism is a political philosophy (Latin root means “people”), and therefore doesn’t speak to rights of animals.
Here, same-same.
I love people because they, too, are God, meaning that something in me is in them as well. But my moral journey isn’t about them, just as libertarianism isn’t about animal rights. My moral journey is about me.
I agree that your morals are your own responsibility. However, it shoots up red flags like you wouldn’t believe when other people–valuable, irreplacable people just like me–are apparently dismissed as “amoral participants”. Let’s just say I find understanding other people to be vital to my moral journey. Simply loving people may be a moral choice, but the manner in which I express that love should depend on who the other person is. If I like arguing, that doesn’t mean that it is OK for me to argue with everyone I meet; I should try to understand other people, and perhaps I will discover that other people don’t like to argue, so I know then not to argue with them. This sort of understanding love seems more truly loving than simply loving them without trying to understand them.
[Edited by Gaudere on 08-15-2000 at 01:08 PM]
I trust you did not extrapolate the notion that other people are part of your amoral matrix to mean that other people are insignificant. From God’s Reference Frame, they are quite significant indeed, each being a part of Him. It is only from your reference frame that they are amoral. You might have mistaken that to mean that you have license to harm them because they don’t “matter”. On the contrary, whatever you do to the least of them, you do also to God.
From my reference frame, they are “amoral” how? “Without morals”? But I certainly believe people have morals.
I meant morally neutral, not unscrupulous. (Can it be that that has been a misunderstanding this whole time?)
I think what you are saying is that whether other people are good or bad does not affect your own personal morality; you choose to be whoever you are regardless of what other people are like. I don’t know if I’d call other people “amoral participants” in that instance though, nor would I consider it wrong or wasted time to try to understand them. Let’s just say I find it easier to be loving when I can understand why people do things that might appear evil than if I just completely ignore their possible motives. If someone bops me over the head and steals my money, I might not feel very loving towards humanity in general for a while; however, if I find out the person did it to feed their starving child rather than buy a new pair of jeans, I’d be a bit less annoyed. Also, understanding people is important so you do not harm them by misguided attempts to show them love, i.e. the person who witnesses to you constantly because he simply can’t understand that you really don’t want him to do so, or the person who treats you the way they would want to be treated instead of the way you want to be treated. I consider it a moral obligation to attempt to understand the desires and motives of those you interact with, so that you will act for the overall best results. If someone steals just because they want a new pair of jeans, you should try to get them to understand that it’s wrong (including sending them to jail if necessary), but if they steal because their child is starving you should help them find a way to provide for their child. Therefore I’d say that understanding other people and their situation is necessary if you want your love for them have the optimum results. Do you agree?
[… amazed stare …]
I wish I had put it exactly that way.
Your point is devastating. I ought to have said that they (or their participation) is morally neutral from the perspective of your reference frame. I failed to define my terms clearly.
Completely.
[… head drooping …]
Sorry I dragged you through all that unnecessary metaphysical blabbering. I should have just listened to you to start with to get a better understanding of where you were coming from. Is there any wonder that I see in you His wonderful Spirit of Life?
But, Lib., if I understand you correctly, there is no justification whatsoever in taking the property of another under any circumstances. While this may seem like a troll to you, I have a problem understanding how you resolve what looks like a contradiction between the conclusion you and Gaudere ended up at and your previous posts on matters non-religious. Care to clarify and resolve my confusion, please?
Thank you, Lib. 
I am glad we have apparently figured some things out. We seem to talk past each other fairly often. I am not often comfortable in a pure-logic world, and tend to keep dragging metaphysical theories back down to the “real world” since I am concerned that people will find some bizarre logical justification for callous acts. Don’t worry about overmuch about defining your terms; sometimes I just have to kick things around for a while and specialized terms often make my eyes glaze over.
I still don’t agree that people are only either wholly good or wholly bad, but I can see how you can explain some apparent paradoxes. However, I am concerned about what effect this belief might have on people. Let’s say we have a person who is loving; he knows he is loving so he is therefore perfectly good, right? He doesn’t usually contribute to charity. He could give $1000. Now, how can he convince himself to up his contributions if he already firmly believes that he is perfectly good and cannot be improved? If he’d rather buy a fifth TV with the money, can he rest assured that he is perfectly good, and it is only his malfunctioning brain that tells him he needs a fifth TV? If I think I am perfectly good, can I just assume that the fact that I haven’t paid for my hacked programs is a brain malfunction that does not reflect on my morality, and continue using them without buying them?
Poly, I think Lib will point out the difference between a Christian act (forgiving someone who steals from you if they did it to save their child) and a libertarian context. In Libertaria, a person has the right to demand reparation from the thief no matter the circumstances, but a Christian wouldn’t if the person had a overpowering need.
Not a bit. The resolution to your confusion is found in your own words: “While this may seem like a troll to you, I have a problem understanding how you resolve what looks like a contradiction between the conclusion you and Gaudere ended up at and your previous posts on matters non-religious.” (Keep reading…)
No civic justification. What a man owes his God or conscience in the context of his morality is completely different from what he owes his fellow man in the context of living together. In the former context, he owes whatever he believes he owes. In the latter, he owes peacefulness and honesty. Libertarianism is a philosophy about relations among people as animals. Christianity is a philosophy about relations among people and God as Spirit.
A man might do something that another man might find immoral. The former owes nothing to the latter, whether or not he has taken a debt with his God or conscience. A man is in debt to his government, libertarianly speaking, when and only when he has coerced another man. With respect to stealing in particular, government has the onus of securing the rights of the victim. God has whatever onus He pleases. There is always much suffering when governments act like God.
In that case, I don’t see how the whole "good/evil spirt thing is neccisary to this explanation. It seems to work just as well without it.
In fact, it seems to complicate matters far more than it helps. This seems to be a way of justifying absolute morality in an abstract sense, but relative morality in a practical sense.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have both “good” and “evil” urges, if you absolutly must use those terms. I try to encourage the former, and supress the latter. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
And I wouldn’t even say that, in the long run, the good side is always morally right, and the evil side is wrong. But I don’t how that requires an either/or explanation.
I’m still not getting it. How can a lone entity, with no framework at all, and no experience dealing with other creatures, (God, pre-creation) make a meaningful “eternal” ethical decision? Why would a lone entity even have a concept of “love?” Why would a lone being be so dualistc?
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“Brought to you from Vermont. The other, smaller Wisconson.”
[… having learned my lesson …]
I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying that God would still be God even if He were a little bit evil?
Well, He doesn’t have “no framework at all”. In fact, His Frame of Reference is Absolutely Objective and Eternal. Experience is meaningless in an eternal reference frame. Don’t you love yourself? Don’t you think it’s even more wonderful when you love someone else, and someone else loves you?
Sorry, guess I wasn’t clear. The first part was refering to “human” spirits you were talking about, not God. What I don’t understand is why spirits have to be either wholly evil or good. There seems to be nothing in your previous argument that requires it, and it makes the whole thing more complicated.
As I don’t know what God is, I have no reason to belive he couldn’t have some “evil” in him. As I don’t really belive in elemental good or evil as such, I’m not sure I’d be able to answer that question even if I did.
One common way of thinking about God, which is what I at first thought you were saying, that is, as basically the plationic ideal of “good” would proably not. But I’m not sure that this type of being would qualify as a “Free Moral Agent.” I think the very act of making this “eternal” choice to be good would make him less than a free agent, and arguably something less than sentient, as we think of it.
Now, God had said “I will be good forever,” and retained in himself the capacity for evil, he’d still be a free moral agent, but you specifically said that he couldn’t (not that he wouldn’t) do so.
I’m not sure that experience IS meaningless in an eternal reference frame.
If God goes through time more or less the same way we do, which is what I thought you were saying, he would have had “no frame of reference” until he created one for himself, as you implied that he predated every other conciousness.
If he dosen’t go through time in some sense, that makes the free moral agent thing questionable. If he has absolute knowlage of the future, can you even make a moral decision, as he knows what decisions he will make beforehand?
An entity outside of time would proably have to have thought processes so alien to ours that I think it would be well beyond concepts of good and evil.
Are you saying that god is the “center” of a sort of fractal core of all possible universes? I’d have no problem with defining such an thing as “God,” or at least his handwriting, but I don’t see how that would make him good or loving. And in fact, it seems ridiculously anthropomorphic to say that such an “entity” would be enough like us to “love” us in a way that would have meaning to us.
Short version, there are lots of ways to define God. You seem to be, as far as I can tell, combining God as “goodness” itself, God as the universe, and an anthropmorphic God. I’m still haveing trouble understanding if that’s even what you’re saying, let alone which specific aspects of each you’re using.
As for the questions:
Do I love myself? Not perticularly. I like some qualities about myself, (though it seems fewer and fewer as time goes on) and dislike others. I’m quite fond of the experience of living, but that’s not the same thing.
Do I like the experience of loving others, and vice versa? In my limited experience, sure. (You’re using the agape type love here, right?) But I’m not sure how that applies. I love humans (intellectually) due to the fact I can empathise with them, and genetically because I’m programed to enjoy thier. I love animals intellectually because I assume, proably incorrectly, that I can empathise with them, and genetically because I’m programed to like and protect cute things, and respect powerful things. I “love” (in some sense) objects becasue they provide me with familiarty and comfort, or represent something else. I’m not sure which version of these would apply to a God type figure.
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“If this whole aztec alien mask thing turns out to be the correct religion, I for one will be very surprised.”